Post-9/11, the War on Terror had outlived its usefulness.
The minds behind the think tanks that drive America’s interventionist foreign policy decided that the U.S. needed a new enemy, so they chose an old one -- Russia.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

- The release dates for A Very Heavy Agenda Parts 2 & 3 have been pushed back slightly. Due to the overwhelming positive response to Part 1, I wanted to make sure Parts 2 & 3 were even stronger and needed a couple more weeks to add some new material.

The new release dates are

1/15/16 - Part 2 2/01/16 - Part 3

- A new Oakland, CA screening for A Very Heavy Agenda Part 1 : A Catalyzing Event is happening tomorrow evening (7pm Thurs, Nov 5th) @ The Palace Theatre. We are asking for a $5-10 donation at the door. Details including location and times can be found on the Facebook event page here

Sunday, September 27, 2015

[from Porkins Policy Review] On this episode we are joined by musician, radio host, and film maker Robbie Martin. The two of us discuss Robbie’s soon to be released film, A Very Heavy Agenda: A Catalyzing Event. The first of a three part film series, A Very Heavy Agenda deals with the neo-conservative movement and the impact that it has had on American politics and world events. Beginning with the 9/11 and anthrax attacks Robbie brings us through the powerful intellectual group that has altered geopolitical history. We explore the neocons as an intellectual force in America and how their premier group, Project for a New American Century, acts as the political arm for the Deep State. We pay particular attention to the Kagan family, which is deeply enmeshed within the American Deep State. We also discuss how the neocon agenda has destroyed much of the anti-war movement. Robbie and I also dive into how the real agenda behind this intellectual movement is about destroying Russia and maintaining perpetual warfare, and not about Islamic Terrorism, oil or anything else. Later we discuss the resurgence of the neocons and the rise of the “hipster neocons.” Robbie explains where they went and how they have come back with a vengeance.follow @PorkinsPolicy on Twitter

Update: Video on Demand streaming and Digital Downloads available on 10/15/15 using this link : https://vimeo.com/ondemand/averyheavyagenda

Quick update to let people know that you will be able to purchase a digital download and stream in full A Very Heavy Agenda Part 1, 2 and 3 as they are released for a low price. We're still working out the details but they will be posted before the release date of Part 1 on 10/15/15.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

While working on the documentary A Very Heavy Agenda I combed through 1,000+ hours of CSPAN video archives. I looked closely at anything Paul Wolfowitz appeared in because inside of the Bush administration, Paul seemed to be the most instrumental in making sure the Project For the New American Century plans went forward without any problems.

For those unfamiliar with PNAC/Project For a New American Century, think of it as the 'civilian formed' ideological engine that drove the George W Bush administration's foreign policy and propaganda. Wolfowitz is not only a co-signer (as were many others in the Bush admin including Cheney and Rumsfeld) he's also credited as one of the creators of PNAC's most infamous paper: 'Rebuilding America's Defenses'.

Before I get to Lincoln Chafee, let's talk a bit more about 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' which was written in September 2000. It laid out extraordinary US foreign policy goals, in essence building up our military and posture to a greater level than during the Cold War because as one of PNAC's co-founders Robert Kagan said 'the world has descended into some form of chaos since the end of the bipolar world'. To the neoconservatives behind PNAC, the Cold War gave them some level of 'safety' wherein the world was more predictable and thus more 'manageable'. Probably the most shocking passage from Rebuilding America's Defenses is that to accomplish these goals in a short period of time 'some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new pearl harbor' would have to occur. Right after 9/11 of course, the same neocons who were behind PNAC started referring to the attacks as 'our pearl harbor' and you probably already know the rest.

Lincoln Chafee eventually came on my radar when I found video of Paul Wolfowitz explaining the rationale for the war in Iraq at a hearing. In the hearing Chafee seems to actually upset Wolfowitz during his semi-aggressive line of questioning.

The only reason this stood out to me is because Lincoln Chafee was a GOP senator who was using language not commonly heard among even the most left-wing anti war factions of the house or senate. After some quick searching I found out he was the only Republican senator to vote against the Iraq war in 2003.

Fast-forward six months later I see that Lincoln Chafee announced he will be running for president in 2016 under the Democratic party ticket. According to Wikipedia his positions on current US foreign policy actually sound pretty reasonable (far more anti-intervention than the current iteration of Rand Paul). Knowing already that Bernie Sanders had successfully navigated around taking on any meaningful foreign policy issue (last time I checked his website omitted any stance) and that Hillary was pretty much a neocon I got a bit excited at the prospect of someone like Lincoln getting into the race and playing the Kucinich role in the televised debates.

Since A Very Heavy Agenda mostly centers around the founders of PNAC, I signed up for the newsletter of the cleverly rebranded version of PNAC called 'The Foreign Policy Initiative'. I get the newsletter so I can see among other things, who is on my 'shit list' now. Most of the time I'm not surprised by the journalists they promote or the politicians that decide to speak at their events. People like Marco Rubio, John McCain, Tom Cotton and Joe Lieberman are regular guests.

This morning however was an exception:

To my horror the upcoming 2015 Foreign Policy Initiative forum is hosting as speaker none other than anti-Iraq war Republican senator Lincoln Chafee. My first thought was maybe the re-branding by PNAC was so clever that Chafee isn't aware the forum is hosted by the same organization that blatantly propagandized the American public into the Iraq war. This delusion of mine quickly fell apart once I remembered that the Foreign Policy Initiative makes no effort to hide the fact they were co-founded by Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol (who wrote extremely deceptive articles trying to tie the 2001 anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein).

Lincoln doesn't seem like the type of person to get hoodwinked into shilling for neocons, so why is he speaking at a PNAC 2.0 event ? Does he have the balls required to publicly push back against the main neoconservative policy makers on their own turf ?

Of course this would be a best case scenario reason for his scheduled talk and I personally have a very hard time believing that would happen even after knowing his history of excommunicating himself from the GOP.

I posed the question to the official Lincoln Chafee twitter account but received no response.

It still remains to be seen why the only Republican senator to vote against the Iraq war is linking up with the neoconservatives who were directly responsible for the Iraq war in the first place.

Monday, September 21, 2015

You can now pre-order A Very Heavy Agenda Part 1 on regular DVD.
The different prices include shipping for 3 different territories [US, Canada and elsewhere].
All pre-orders will be shipped on the release date of 10/15/15 but credit cards will be processed on the date the pre-order is placed. Links below...

[note: the movie was rendered in HD 720p but most of the clips used are from pre-HD television, it still looks fine on standard DVD]

standard DVD

shipping destination

A Very Heavy Agenda

Post-9/11, the War on Terror had outlived its usefulness.

The minds behind the think tanks that drive America’s interventionist foreign policy decided that the U.S. needed a new enemy, so they chose an old one -- Russia.

Part 1: A Catalyzing Event 1hr 25mins

Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were ubiquitous in the news media as they took every available opportunity to market to America an aggressive preemptive war policy. But from where did their ideas originate? The answer is a tightly knit and eminently well placed group of neoconservative thought leaders, chief among them Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. Part 1 begins in the panicked weeks after 9/11, as Kagan et al. seized upon the hysteria surrounding the anthrax letter attacks to further shape America’s perception of reality, planting the seeds for endless future military engagements. George W. Bush may have been understandably perceived as an idiot, but watching these wonks and academics drive the ideological engine for his administration belies a much more sophisticated strategy at play.

Part 2: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The New Neocons 1hr35mins

After the Cold War, the US-NATO reach expanded significantly to take in most of the old Soviet Union clients in the Warsaw pact. Neoconservative darling Robert Kagan and his diplomat wife Victoria Nuland played key roles inside and out of various administrations and think tanks as they greased the skids for a US-sponsored coup in Ukraine. Part 2 shows the resurrection of old cold warriors from beltway depths to deliver blatant propaganda with techniques reminiscent of a red scare era that had only just faded from memory. US-funded outfits like Radio Free Liberty are pitted against Russia’s RT as each nation accuses the other of waging an ever more desperate and transparent "Information War".

While stage managing the American empire has undoubtedly proved to be a more difficult task now than in the bipolar world of the cold war era, it is not for lack of greed or hubris that the Kagans and others continue to sell their vision.

Did they create these ideas because they truly believe in America's right to be the dominant force in the world? Or, do these ideas help sell weapons and control resources like oil and rare minerals? Part 3 shows interview footage of an obscure PNAC member (Thomas Donnelly) taking credit for the ominous “New Pearl Harbor” phrasing in the notorious 'Rebuilding America’s Defenses' document. But the evidence shows the genesis of the concept to be patriarch Don Kagan, in conjunction with his son Fred, in prior op-eds that call for ‘a catalyzing event’. Other newly sourced footage shows the pair advocating for a US military ground invasion of Palestine on September 12th, 2001 and displaying an unnerving prescience about the 9/11 attacks themselves.

"We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality, and while you're studying that reality—we'll act again, creating other new realities which you can study too. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do" - Karl Rove

When you take stock of the mindset of people who not only have access to the nexuses of power, but who trade in forming and widely disseminating arguments that justify bringing America closer to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia, it shows something more plainly Machiavellian at work, with an aim ultimately much more sinister than simply spin.

Produced/Edited/Created by: Robbie Martin

Original Score by: Fluorescent Grey

A Very Heavy Agenda is a joint production between Media Roots & RecordLabelRecords MediaRoots.org RecordLabelRecords.org

Thursday, September 17, 2015

I went on Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff's Project Censored show to talk about A Very Heavy Agenda.

9/11 and the Rise of Neoconservative Foreign Policy. For this 14th anniversary 9/11 special program, co-hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips speak with Media Roots journalist and filmmaker Robbie Martin about his new film “A Very Heavy Agenda.” The film looks in depth at the Kagan family and the rise of neoconservative foreign policy prior to and since the events of 9/11. Tune in for a detailed discussion about the development of the US policy driving American Empire.
[from the KPFA website]

While I'm still finishing up a proper trailer for public consumption, please enjoy these animated gifs about Project for the New American Century 2.0 aka The Foreign Policy Initiative from 'A Very Heavy Agenda'.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

I hold my nose and check out Drudge once and awhile, but lately I've noticed a familiar and very suspicious website rising in the ranks, a website that once was only featured at the bottom of the front page and is now frequently getting top billing. This webite is known as 'The Gateway Pundit' and last year I discovered that Jim Hoft, the man behind 'The Gateway Pundit' was most likely behind a hoax story using a Twitter sock puppet to drum up irrational fear about muslims inside the United States.

[The following was originally written as a series of tweets in September 2014]

See the story in the very bottom left corner? It was a sister story that spread around generic hysterical moronic right-wing websites and talk radio all weekend.

"Muslims Shout 'Praise Allah!' Following Press Conference"

So of course finding the headline completely bullshit on it's face I had to go watch the press conference for myself here.

Nobody yells anything during it.

On Drudge they linked to the original source for the story, an independently operated conservative website called 'The Gateway Pundit'.

When you click on the actual story you see immediately what the supposed 'source' was.

A guy named Bob Lawson who allegedly goes by the twitter handle @LandonLawson78
whose Twitter account no longer exists. On Google cache you can see that it's a very inactive account and only has 17 followers.

Suspicious on its face, but not 'proof' that it's a fake or sock puppet twitter account (yet) Whoever was running this account wanted to throw in convincing tweets to show it was just some regular 'joe-6-pack' construction worker.

Oddly no one called out this person as being fake or making up the story, but his account was inexplicably self immolated within hours of the story going viral through ring wing media. The Twitter account was doing a great job of riling people up before that though.

Next step was to find out if the picture was of a real person or if a Bob Lawson lived in Oklahoma and existed anywhere else online. With a quick reverse image lookup it became clear this was a sock puppet/fake twitter account to begin with. Someone chose a stock image that looked like how someone who might run a click bait website 'The Gateway Pundit' might imagine a redneck in Oklahoma looks.

Interestingly only one conservative outlet I could find ran a retraction, but they mentioned nothing about the obvious fake nature of the 'source' and originally ran with it as well.

Breitbart only confirms the story is false by asking the police, even though from 10 minutes of google sleuthing you could have found pretty convincing evidence it was fake from the very beginning. Apparently the hysteria about muslim terrorism is more important than fact checking (which is obviously nothing new to people who've landed on this blog in the first place).

So this begs the question, how many stories does the Gatewaypundit.com make up out of thin air or base on clearly fake and unreliable information?

If this wasn't Jim Hoft's sock puppet account, he could have answered my inquiry with a simple 'no' but he chose to ignore me instead.

Update [ 9/14/15 1:29AM PST] :

After posting this information about Gateway Pundit, Daniel Wright responded with a few good points about plausible deniability:

He's right, by creating a sock puppet and then basing a 'breaking' story off of said sock puppet that goes poof within hours of a story going viral is a pretty flawless way to cover your tracks. This doesn't prove Jim Hoft was directly behind any of it, but for those who have seen the pattern before it's all too easy to pull something like this off.

[In 2004 a few friends and I managed to pull off a hoax that was picked up by the Associated Press and Reuters then filtered down to almost every major news agency in the world. It took a full 24 hours before news agencies retracted the story as false]

When people think of insane warmongering neoconservatives names like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol usually take the top slots while members of the neoconservative Kagan family have more or less dodged the same level of tarnishing to their reputations. The most well known member of the family is Robert Kagan, PNAC co-founder, author and husband of US Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland.

Well respected and admired among policy makers, military generals and politicians but mostly unknown to the general public is Robert's brother, Fred Kagan. He heavily advised Pentagon generals during the Bush and Obama administration and is widely credited along with his wife Kim Kagan for creating the concept and strategic implementation of the troop 'surge' in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fred currently works for the American Enterprise Institute's 'Critical Threats Project' appearing occasionally at talks and authoring policy papers but today rarely appearing as a pundit on radio or TV. His lack of public appearances might be in part because one obscure radio appearance he made with his father Don Kagan on 9/12/01 contained some of the most horrifying and dangerous neoconservative rhetoric ever spoken aloud publicly.

While archive digging for my upcoming Media Roots documentary film: A Very Heavy Agenda, I discovered a shocking clip [above] from a radio program called 'Extension 720' hosted by Milt Rosenberg on WGN AM. Only one day after the 9/11 attacks, Fred and Don Kagan called in to give their recommendations of how America should respond. Throughout the conversation they seem completely disinterested in Afghanistan or Bin Laden. Don says "as long as we go after the actual perpetrators our job is going to be next to impossible" and that "Afghanistan is a distraction". Afghanistan is hurriedly brushed aside by both so they can shoehorn in their preferable target for a US military response : Palestine.

start selected transcript [dashes denote edit points]:
---
Don Kagan: One key place is certainly the Palestinian authority, these guys are at the center of all sorts of terrorist organizations that we've seen operate before
---
Fred Kagan: We know that they have extensive bases in Palestine and Palestinian areas
---
Fred Kagan: We have to take the war to these people, i think we should hit them immediately

Milt Rosenberg: How? Air power?

Fred Kagan: No, I would prefer to see ground forces go into Palestine and hunt down Hezbollah, i would like to see delta force raids, i would like to see the full panoply of covert operations
---
Fred Kagan: I would also like to see American ground forces deployed into Palestine, to restore peace in that area.
---
Milt Rosenberg: Now wait I must ask you Don, do you mean the Palestine authority the PLO, or do you mean Hamas and Hezbollah?

Don Kagan: No I mean Arafat
---
Don Kagan: Then Our responsibility is to clean it our for him, including him [Arafat], and placing a regime which can suppress terrorism.

Milt Rosenberg: Then what does that mean again in terms of.. military?

Don Kagan: Military force, absolutely.
---
Milt Rosenberg: Donald Kagan I'm beginning to get the sense that you're suggesting if we do this we need to take strong military action including land forces not only against the Taliban in Afghanistan but i would suppose at the same time against the Arafat regime and Palestinian authority

Don Kagan: absolutely

---end transcript

Update: 2:25 PM:

I e-mailed Donald Kagan for clarification about his statements, his response below [click on the image to enlarge]

Here is a transcript of his anthrax fear mongering at the very end of the video:

start transcript [dashes denote edit points]:
--

Don Kagan: I'm sure in 3-4 days in spite of what happened in New York and Washington, everybody will go back to where we were before, and think 'ok, that was a one-shot, that's over'.What would have happened if instead of just having a lot of jet fuel on those planes, they had had anthrax [inaudible].

--

Don Kagan: Do you have any clue what that would have been?Now those are the options that are before us, people are capable of doing that.
Our question is how can we to stop them from being able to do that, and there is no way.

I wouldn't be surprised if IDF soldiers overthrowing the Arafat regime was a situation gamed out multiple times by the Israeli military but what about US ground troops helping this effort?
Was there any point where Israeli officials actually wanted US ground troops to conduct warfare in Palestinian territories? It might seem strange considering the general alignment neoconservatism has always had with Israeli interests, but were Don and Fred suggesting usurping the Israeli government and conducting this action independently?
Regardless of these remaining questions when you consider that most of the Palestinian territories are essentially open air prisons, the idea of invading these areas with any military force is deeply disturbing. I can't find a record of anyone in the actual Bush administration who focused on Palestine as retaliation to 9/11, most of their eyes were focused on Iraq. Unfortunately the two civilians who suggested putting US troops on Palestinian land to 'restore peace to that area' aren't usually characterized as mentally ill sociopaths. Instead they continue to be well respected by academic intellectuals and seasoned members of the Washington DC establishment.

Get updates via my twitter account or here at this blog for information on my upcoming documentary: A Very Heavy Agenda.